@Helm - I approve of all your edits. Theyre good in their subtlety, and i like the choice placement of some of the edits. The highlight adjustments are subtle but feel better, and i like the stronger cuts on the right shoulder and bicep (i actually darkened the same bicep region on my cleanup in a nearly identical manner you did) I was hoping that you would spend a few moments to do this, because i was hoping to gain some insight on your intuition on pixel placement with specific cluster regions i wasnt quite sure about.

I had fun doing this and im glad you posted another one - im going to go check out that thread right now to give it a shot. One thing that capcom seemed to have learned along the years was a concept similar to clusters when they came around to re-rendering their CVS sprites - but im quite sure this was largely a forced adaptation from the already superior SNK pixel technique.

Also for what its worth, Ive tried to really take to heart some of those edits youve given me over the past year or more involving clusters, and re-read your tutorial several times, to help me adapt to a cleaner pixel style. i feel its crucial for readability on small sprites and tiles, and allowed me to advance from the heavily AA'ed work that i had clung to in the past. Sometimes its hard to admit there are better ways to do things other than the way one is currently doing them and its natural to resist change. but i think these types of studies are doing their part to advance pixel art as an art in the same spirit that this forum was blessed with when it was first conceptualized.

http://spriteart.com/archive/superbat/ <- check here if you want better quality sources for super bat sprite references.

hope you dont mind, i tried an edit of your character to see what shed look like with a few things i had in mind that i would have cleaned up some if it were my character.

I just kindof feel that shes looking a little chunky - i can see youre going with a stylized route, and having some 'thickness' isnt bad or wrong or anything. but perhaps thinning up the legs some and shrinking the feet would do the character's proportions a lot of good. (i left one shoe unedited, i ran out of time to finish it).

what i really dont understand is why the eyes are black. giving her some proper eye whites really improved the overall look of the face i found.

i really enjoy the overall color scheme she has, though i made some very minor palette adjustments on my version ( not very noticeable ones. just some values here and there that made for better transition values for AA and such).

awesome animation mockup, should look slick once its fully animated

"Look at meee. look at MEEEE!"
</unconstr>

if you wanted to start a real discussion about pixel art, technique, quality, examples, study, reference, etc, im sure you could wind up being credited for starting a really great thread.

otherwise... i can say that i enjoy the abe's odyssey mockup.

ehhh - again feel obligated to respond after an old tutorial link.

Basically theres as many different ways to represent grass as you can think of representing it. certain things work better than others. certain methods are more popular than others. finding a style that will work for you will certainly help you out much better than trying to emulate someone elses method of doing something.

Having said that, i created a quick little step by step example of how I might go about making some grass tiles today.

note this assumes a pretty simple case of using 32x32 tiles (SD3 screenshot above uses 16x16 tiles, which allows for more granularity so to speak, which can translate into more versatility with transition cases, hiding seams, making special cases, etc).

just using some basic 'spruces' of grass. they look a bit leafy because its a quicker method than trying to emulate thinly bladed grass. also unless the grass is quite tall, trying to define thin blades of grass just doesnt work out very well, because at the pixel level, even that doesnt give you the proper level of detail to insinuate little blades of grass, so we just work with implied 'clumps' of it.


then if i wanted to i might start to imply a little depth. notice im not really taking much care in this example to cleanliness or blending or anything. the greater care taken the more smooth the result will be. this basically just adds an extra layer of depth if you want a 'thicker' grass (note games and game mockups do quite well using rather flat colors for grass with just the occasional groups of implied grass, much more sparse than this).


you can take it a step further if you want and add different values of highlights in between the existing clumps to create more subtly lit areas of grass clumps. your grass will naturally look denser doing this. perhaps it might allow you to more strategically place some of your grass shadow.


from here, add different tiles with different varieties of patterns of clumps or even various different layers of 'depth' for more organic composition of your grass texutres.

NOTE: these clumps are rather sloppy and more care could be taken to make it cleaner and more aesthetically appealing, but thats where the grunt work to pixelling comes in. I made this progression in about 10 minutes, id spend more time on it but i unfortunately have many other things to be doing lately :/. hopefully this will give you some more insight on how you _could_ go about doing some grass. Of course this isnt the only way to do it and maybe other people could jump in on how they go about doing their grass as well.